As a joyful mother of an eight-year-old daughter, Sharanda Jones was thriving. Her restaurant, Cooking on Lamar, was her pride, and it was beginning to do well. Yet she was on trial for federal drug charges. On the day of the verdict, she fully expected to be declared not guilty, given the weak case against her. She was not only declared guilty but also sentenced to life in prison. She would not see her daughter Clenesha again as a free woman for over 16 years. When Brittany Barnett, who was in law school, saw Sharanda in a YouTube video, she could not make sense of how “such a beautiful, vibrant woman” (5) could be doomed to spend her life in prison. Barnett had to shut her computer because she could only think of her own mother, prisoner number 1374671. Sharanda could just as easily have been her mother.

Barnett’s mother Evelyn was “a tall, long-waisted, young Black woman with the deep-set paisley eyes and the high, full cheekbones of her Filipina and half-Cherokee grandmothers” (10) when she had Barnett and her younger sister Jazz. Evelyn was from Greenville, Texas, which at the time had a welcome sign proclaiming itself as “the blackest land and the whitest people” (10).